Guest post by Bob Tisdale
This is the first of a series of posts that address many of the myths and misunderstandings about the tropical Pacific processes that herald themselves during El Niño and La Niña events. Most of the content will be chapters from my recently published ebook Who Turned on the Heat?
For almost 4 years, my presentations about the long-term effects of El Niño and La Niña events indicate the global oceans over the past 30+ years have warmed naturally. This puzzles many proponents of anthropogenic global warming. They see the often-used name for the coupled ocean-atmosphere process—El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)—and assume the processes are oscillatory or cyclical. They will then post a comment to the effect of:
What part of oscillation don’t you understand?
Or
Haven’t you ever heard of the ENSO cycle? El Niño and La Niña are parts of a cycle. How can a cycle cause long-term global warming?
Comments like that are the first clue their authors are arguing from ignorance; that is, they have no understanding of the subjects being discussed—none whatsoever.
First off, it indicates those persons have never examined an ENSO index, such as the sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region—an area along the eastern equatorial Pacific bordered by the coordinates of 5S-5N, 170W-120W. ENSO indices are used to indicate how often El Niño and La Niña events happen, how strong they were, and how long they lasted. If El Niño and La Niña events were cyclical, they’d transition between El Niño and La Niña then back to El Niño and on to La Niña again, and so on. But they don’t cycle between El Niños and La Niñas. There can be back-to-back and back-to-back-back El Niño conditions without La Niña conditions appearing between them. See Figure 1. And there can be the double-dip La Niñas, like we’ve experienced recently.
Figure 1
Part of the confusion stems from the term El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which is really the combination of two names. Some of the confusion stems from the attempts of climate modelers who often treat the processes of ENSO as cycles in their failed attempts to simulate ENSO.
CHAPTER 2.1 DO THE WORDS “OSCILLATION” AND “CYCLE” IN THE NAMES “EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION AND “ENSO CYCLE” CAUSE MISUNDERSTANDINGS?
The words oscillation and cycle are used to describe the processes of El Niño and La Niña events as a single phenomenon. The commonly used term ENSO stands for El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The seemingly redundant term ENSO Cycle (El Niño-Southern Oscillation Cycle) is also used often. Many persons assume because cycle and oscillation are used to describe El Niño and La Niña that the two states oppose and offset one another, that a La Niña will counteract an El Niño. Bad assumptions. They definitely do not work that way.
The most obvious difference between the two states, which we discuss in Sections 1 and 3, is, El Niño events randomly release vast amounts of warm water from below the surface of the west Pacific Warm Pool and spread it across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, but the reverse does not occur during La Niña events.
Are El Niño and La Niña events cyclical or oscillatory? Some parts are, and some parts aren’t. We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 4.17 ENSO – A Cycle or Series of Events?
AN OVERVIEW OF THE TERMS EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION AND ENSO CYCLE
El Niño-Southern Oscillation is the combination of two names. The term is said to have been coined by Rasmussen and Carpenter in their (1982) paper Variations in Tropical Sea Surface Temperature and Surface Wind Fields Associated with the Southern Oscillation/El Niño. Let’s see what Rasmussen and Carpenter have to say about the individual components. Their Introduction begins with the term El Niño:
The interannual variability of sea surface temperature (SST) along the Peru-Ecuador coast is dominated by the El Niño phenomenon. The name El Niño was originally applied to a weak warm coastal current which annually runs southward along the coast of Ecuador around the Christmas season (Wyrtki 1975). In scientific usage, the term has now become more narrowly associated with the extreme warmings which occur every few years (Wyrtki 1979a), and which result in catastrophic effects on the ecological system of the region. In more recent years, Ramage (1975), Weare et al. (1976), and others have used the term to encompass the larger-scale features of the warming event; i.e., the upwelling area along both the equator and the South American coast.
A few paragraphs later, Rasmussen and Carpenter describe the Southern Oscillation after discussing some initial findings from as far back as 1897:
It remained, however, for Sir Gilbert Walker, in a classical series of papers (Walker, 1923, 1924, 1928; Walker and Bliss, 1930, 1932, 1937) to name the SO [Southern Oscillation] and describe the salient features of the surface pressure, temperature and precipitation fluctuations.
The full title of the first Walker paper is WALKER, G. T. (1923). Correlation in seasonal variations of weather. VIII. A preliminary study of world-weather. Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Department 24(Part 4) 75–131.
These papers by Walker were not discussions of El Niño, however. The link between El Niño and the Southern Oscillation wasn’t established until the 1960s. Therefore, the word oscillation in Southern Oscillation does not apply to El Niño and La Niña events or their processes. It only applies to the impacts of El Niño and La Niña on the sea level pressures in Tahiti and Darwin, Australia.
The sequence of papers and the advancement in ENSO research is further described in Rasmussen and Carpenter (1982).
Then there’s the term “ENSO Cycle”. The NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and many others, including me, use the phrase to describe El Niño and La Niña events and the variations from one state to the other. Refer to the CPC’s wonderful series of ENSO-related web pages ENSO Cycle that we’ll use for further discussions in Chapter 4.14 Impacts of ENSO Events on Regional Temperature and Precipitation.
DEFINITIONS OF OSCILLATION AND CYCLE
The Wikipedia definition of Oscillation begins:
Oscillation is the repetitive variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states.
El Niño and La Niña events do not repeat in time, there are very few things that are repetitive in ENSO, so by this definition, ENSO isn’t a true oscillation. In fact, Wikipedia writes in their initial description of El Niño-Southern Oscillation.
El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a quasiperiodicclimate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean roughly every five years.
Oscillation is much easier to write than “quasiperiodic climate pattern”. To add confusion, “pattern” has multiple meanings. It could be used as “pattern in time”, or to describe a “spatial pattern”, as in the warming or cooling of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.
Webster has a number of definitions for the word cycle. The one that fits ENSO best is:
1: a recurring series of events: as…
c : a series of ecological stages through which a substance tends to pass and which usually but not always leads back to the starting point <the cycle of nitrogen in the living world>
Because an El Niño event does not always lead to a La Niña event and because La Niña events can be followed by another independent La Niña event, this definition of cycle under “c” is applicable to ENSO.
The term Southern Oscillation is used to represent the effects of El Niño and La Niña on the sea level pressure of the off-equatorial South Pacific. We’ll discuss it further in Chapter 4.3 ENSO Indices. Also discussed in that chapter, there’s another widely used ENSO index. It represents the effects of El Niño and La Niña events on the sea surface temperature anomalies of the equatorial Pacific region called NINO3.4, which is bounded by the coordinates of 5S-5N, 170W-120W. The Southern Oscillation Index and NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies do NOT represent the process of ENSO. They are used only to indicate the frequency, strength and duration of El Niño and La Niña events. They indicate nothing more. They do not represent the process of ENSO, only its effect on the variable being measured for the index.
RECAP
El Niño-Southern Oscillation and ENSO Cycle are convenient phrases used to describe El Niño and La Niña. El Niño and La Niña events are not repetitive in time so they are not true oscillations. If it’s understood that an ENSO cycle may not lead to another series of El Niño and La Niña events nor even lead to the opposite phase, then cycle is applicable.
It’s a lot easier to write El Niño-Southern Oscillation than it is to write El Niño-La Niña/Sea Level Pressure Difference Between Darwin and Tahiti Quasiperiodic Climate Pattern.
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CHAPTER 4.17: ENSO – A CYCLE OR SERIES OF EVENTS?
If you were to Google ENSO and cycle, you’d get over 700,000 results. Limit your search to Google Scholar and there are more than 39,000 results. Place “ENSO cycle” in quotes and there’s almost 5,800. One of the reasons: ENSO stands for El Niño-Southern Oscillation and oscillation implies cyclical behavior. Another reason: the delayed oscillator theory suggests that one phase leads to the next, and that sure sounds like a cycle. However, is ENSO really a cycle?
The need to treat ENSO as a cycle arises from the attempts to model ENSO with computers. Mother Nature, however, apparently isn’t concerned about our ability to model it. While parts of ENSO act as a cycle, the evolution of an El Niño event requires a basically random event to initiate it. Therefore, to answer the title question of this chapter, ENSO is a combination of the two.
Kessler (2002) Is ENSO a cycle or a series of events? discusses how observational data suggest that El Niño events are event-like disturbances, while other phases display the behavior of a cycle. The abstract reads:
After early ideas that saw El Niños as isolated events, the advent of coupled models brought the conception of ENSO as a cycle in which each phase led to the next in a self-sustained oscillation. Twenty-two years of observations that represent the El Niño and La Niña peaks (east Pacific SST) and the memory of the system (zonal-mean warm water volume) suggest a distinct break in the cycle, in which the coupled system is able to remain in a weak La Niña state for up to two years, so that memory of previous influences would be lost. Similarly, while the amplitude of anomalies persists from the onset of a warm event through its termination, there is no such persistence across the La Niña break. These observations suggest that El Niños are in fact event-like disturbances to a stable basic state, requiring an initiating impulse not contained in the dynamics of the cycle itself.
When studying this subject and looking for additional papers, it is important to isolate discussions of models and the efforts being taken to improve them. Models are not reality. They are attempts to simulate Mother Nature with computers. The discussion of whether ENSO is a cycle or a series of events is an observations-based discussion. Some of the model-based papers do include discussions of observations, but you have to make sure you’re basing your understandings of ENSO on the observations and not the models in those papers. That pretty much holds true for all climate and climate change papers.
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THE REST OF THIS SERIES
The remainder of this series of posts will be taken from the following myths and failed arguments. They’re from Section 7 of my book Who Turned on the Heat? I may select them out of the order they’ve been presented here, and I’ll try to remember to include links to the other posts in these lists as the new posts are published.
A New Myth – ENSO Balances Out to Zero over the Long Term
Failed Argument – El Niño Events Don’t Create Heat
Myth – ENSO Has No Trend and Cannot Contribute to Long-Term Warming
Myth – The Effects of La Niña Events on Global Surface Temperatures Oppose those of El Niño Events
Myth – El Niño Events Dominated the Recent Warming Period Because of Greenhouse Gases
Myth – ENSO Only Adds Noise to the Instrument Temperature Record and We Can Determine its Effects through Linear Regression Analysis, Then Remove Those Effects, Leaving the Anthropogenic Global Warming Signal
Myth – The Warm Water Available for El Niño Events Can Only be Explained by Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Forcing
Myth – The Frequency and Strength of El Niño and La Niña Events are Dictated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
And I’ll include a few of the failed arguments that have been presented in defense of anthropogenic warming of the global oceans.
Failed Argument – The East Indian-West Pacific and East Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Datasets are Inversely Related. That Is, There’s a Seesaw Effect. One Warms, the Other Cools. They Counteract One Another.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?
Why should you be interested? Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.
Who Turned on the Heat?was introduced in the blog post Everything You Every Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Updated Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing. The book was updated recently to correct a few typos.
Please buy a copy. (Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account.). It’s only US$8.00.
VIDEOS
For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat? see Part 1 and Part 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. Part 1 appeared in the 24-hour WattsUpWithThat TV (WUWT-TV) special in November 2012. You may also be interested in the video Dear President Obama: A Video Memo about Climate Change.
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Take a look at Bob’s figure 1 and compare it with the X and Y plots in this article on chaos. An oscillation with alternating periods of predominance of high and low values points to a nonlinear/nonequilibrium pattern system controlled by a Lorenz attractor.
Matthew R Marler says: “How can you tell that the El Niño does not emerge from an oscillatory process, or a set of oscillatory processes?”
I’ll defer to the paper I linked in the post Kessler (2002): http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/abstracts/2002GL015924.pdf
Bill Kessler writes: “These observations suggest that El Niños are in fact event-like disturbances to a stable basic state, requiring an initiating impulse not contained in the dynamics of the cycle itself.”
Matthew R Marler says: “Do you know what causes an El Niño to occur? If that’s in your other writing or your book, I’ll go there.”
A relaxation of the trade winds initiates an El Niño. The relaxation is caused by weather phenomena called Westerly Wind Bursts. From Chapter 4.15 of “Who Turned on the Heat?” (page 298):
A phenomenon known as a Westerly Wind Burst (WWB), also known as a Westerly Wind Event (WWE), accompanies the relaxed trade winds. If you wanted to investigate this further, those would be the phrases to use in your searches. There are multiple causes of Westerly Wind Bursts, including:
1. Cross-equatorial tropical cyclones in the western tropical Pacific. This refers to a time when one tropical cyclone exists north of the equator in the western tropical Pacific, while, at the same time, another tropical cyclone exists there but south of the equator. The tropical cyclone winds in the Northern Hemisphere rotate counterclockwise and in the Southern Hemisphere they’re clockwise. Between them, the winds would be traveling from east to west. These are discussed in Keen (1982) “The Role of Cross-Equatorial Tropical Cyclone Pairs in the Southern Oscillation”.
2. A single cyclone and series of cyclones in the western tropical Pacific. These are discussed in Hartten (1996) “Synoptic settings of westerly wind bursts”.
3. Cold surges from mid-latitudes, discussed in Harrison (1984) “The appearance of sustained equatorial surface westerlies during the 1982 pacific warm event”.
4. Convective cloud clusters associated with the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO). Refer to Zhang (1995) “Atmospheric Intraseasonal Variability at the Surface in the Tropical Western Pacific Ocean”.
@- Bob Tisdale
“The links you provided are to paleoclimatological reconstructions—aka make-believe data—not instrument-measured temperature data.”
Paleoclimate reconstructions are just as instrumental, or make-believe as thermometer, rain-gauge and satellite sensor data. To pretend they do not provide a record of the ENSO process in the past is a silly and egregious position that suggests that you wish to avoid some aspect of the historical record because it refutes your claims.
@-“Why does the Rest-of the-World data warm only during those El Niño events, izen? Because, it very obviously does not cool proportionally during the La Niña events that followed those big El Niños.”
Well there is always the altered radiative transfer in the atmosphere as a cause. As you may be aware there are measured increases in downwelling energy, an effective reduction in the rate of energy loss from the surface.
“A Cycle or Series of Events?”
An event series, though with some degree of cyclicity, as low solar conditions tends to happen more at particular points in the sunspot cycle.
izen says: “Well there is always the altered radiative transfer in the atmosphere as a cause. As you may be aware there are measured increases in downwelling energy, an effective reduction in the rate of energy loss from the surface.”
Are you now suggesting that global temperatures respond differently to El Nino and La Nina events? That’s what it sound like.
@- Bob Tisdale
“Are you now suggesting that global temperatures respond differently to El Nino and La Nina events? That’s what it sound like.”
No, I am suggesting that the rate of energy loss is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, so is higher during the higher temperatures of an El Nino, but is mediated by the radiative transfer within the atmosphere. When the atmosphere contains more of a substance that can thermalise electromagnetic energy into kinetic energy of the molecules of the atmosphere more thermal energy is retained near the surface, thereby keeping more thermal energy than would have been lost without the effect of more IR to thermal conversion molecules in the atmosphere.
@ur momisugly Carrick: You wrote: “Perhaps to a layperson, but it’s a bit more complex than that as used in science. A system like x = cos(2*pi*3*t) + cos(2*pi*5*t) is clearly oscillatory, but you don’t have strict “up and down” behavior.”
Thank you, but let me say that I understand that El Nino and La Nina is not a sine wave and can not be modeled as one, though it looks the same. The equation you provided as an analogy is predictable, while ENSO is not. Just plug in some t=time into your equation and you get a point along the oscillation curve of that equation. The point is subtle but not insignificant.
I think Tisdale does a fine job illustrating strong evidence that ENSO processes do more than simply exhange heat to and from the oceans. The phnomenon described as ENSO have shown to be able to create conditions which can lead to more net heat store (albido and other changes). I also do not have the credentials to put words in his mouth so to speak.
@Carrick: You Wrote “Hate to dispel myth dispellers, but cyclic doesn’t necessarily mean periodic. Any system that switches between two states (“El Niño and La Niña”) is by definition cyclic even if its not periodic. Simply going from state A to neutral then back to state A before switching to state B does not imply the system is not cyclic.”
The definition of oscillate:
1 a: to swing backward and forward like a pendulum
b: to move or travel back and forth between two points
2: to vary between opposing beliefs, feelings, or theories
3: to vary above and below a mean value
The term oscillate implies something.
ENSO does not swing back and forth between two points
ENSO does not vary above and below a mean value
I’m just saying, not everything that is analog is an oscillation…
Bob Tisdale says:
December 5, 2012 at 12:59 am
Thank you.
Its LALALALALALALALALALA a nonlinear LALALALALALALALALALALA
oscillator LALALALALALALALALALALALA
izen says: “No…”
Then you haven’t replied to my earlier question (which was “Why does the Rest-of the-World data warm only during those El Niño events, izen? Because, it very obviously does not cool proportionally during the La Niña events that followed those big El Niños.”). The fact that you provided an answer to that question strongly suggested that you acknowledged the existence of those divergences. Now you say no and provide a more detailed answer, but it’s difficult to determine what you’re responding to if you’re now not acknowledging those divergences. What question are you replying to or are you simply writing for writing’s sake?
izen said earlier, “Paleoclimate reconstructions are just as instrumental, or make-believe as thermometer, rain-gauge and satellite sensor data. To pretend they do not provide a record of the ENSO process in the past is a silly and egregious position that suggests that you wish to avoid some aspect of the historical record because it refutes your claims.”
Your comment indicates you’ve never plotted paleo reconstructions of ENSO indices, izen. Here’s a comparison graph of NINO3 sea surface temperatures from Cook (2003) and Mann (2000), with both datasets smoothed with 31-year filters:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2n1szl.jpg
Do you see any similarities between the two reconstructions? Why would you think they would have any value in a study of the impacts of ENSO on global temperatures, izen?
On the other hand, Smith and Reynolds (2004) called the satellite-era OI.v2 sea surface temperature dataset “the truth”.
The paleoclimatological record doesn’t refute my claims. My discussions are for the satellite era of sea surface temperatures—the last 30 years–for a specific reasons. First is the dataset. It’s the best there is. Second, if the greenhouse gas-driven global warming hypothesis doesn’t work during the satellite era of sea surface temperatures, a period when the IPCC’s climate models say the warming have to come from greenhouse gases, why would you think it worked during the other portions of the paleoclimatological record? It appears to all reading this thread that you cannot refute what the satellite-era data says, so you’re introducing your unwarranted beliefs in paleoclimatological data to distract from the issue.
Mario Lento: The definition of oscillate:
There are more kinds of oscillation than you itemize. There are quasi-periodic systems where the system never returns to exactly the same state twice, but recurrently returns to each region in the state space almost periodically. The complete region within which the system spends its time is called a “strange attractor”. A physical/biological example is heart beat.
Mario Lento:
Again “swing back and forth between two points” is a lay definition of oscillation.
ENSO can be defined in terms of two state El Niño and La Niña, so it’s cyclic.
ENSO can be defined in terms of a continuously changing variable (e.g., temperature in the ENSO3.4 region) so it is further oscillatory.
ENSO3.4 temperature anomaly has two sharply defined frequency components near three and five years, which are not and would not be expected to be fixed frequency, so it’s a quasi-periodic oscillation.
This is a good example and is similar in some respects to the phenomenon we’re looking at here.
Many cycles are known to go through what are called “phase changes.” For example, if winter were to begin taking place close to the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, this would be a phase change. That would not mean the tropical year was not a cycle. Phase changes may be due to interactions between various cycles. The tropical year, the QBO and the ENSO are known to sometimes “phase lock.”
-Weather Cycles: Real or Imaginary (Second edition) William James Burroughs Cambridge University Press.
Carrick says:
December 5, 2012 at 11:29 am
Mario Lento:
ENSO does not swing back and forth between two points
ENSO does not vary above and below a mean value
Again “swing back and forth between two points” is a lay definition of oscillation.
An oscillation can look like this
if its a chaotic nonlinear one, that is. It cant be corrected for like a linear oscillator, Bob is correct about this.
phlogiston:
You do need a nonlinearly coupled system to get the ENSO behavior, but it doesn’t have to be chaotic. If you have two coupled modes that are quasi-periodic according to the spectrum I showed above, almost any physical model that realizes this is going to have nonlinearity associated with it.
Bob Tisdale: Bill Kessler writes: “These observations suggest that El Niños are in fact event-like disturbances to a stable basic state, requiring an initiating impulse not contained in the dynamics of the cycle itself.”
The observations also suggest that El Niños are “catastrophes” in the dynamical systems sense.
Bob – Has anyone come up with a predictor for the El Nino Index?
Matthew R Marler says: “The observations also suggest that El Niños are “catastrophes” in the dynamical systems sense.”
El Ninos are total collapses of the normal and La Nina states, where La Ninas are simply an exaggerated-normal state.
Bob Tisdale: El Ninos are total collapses of the normal and La Nina states, where La Ninas are simply an exaggerated-normal state.
“Total collapse” isn’t that useful a concept. I bet you will find it worthwhile to revisit the “catastrophe” idea of dynamical systems some day. An example might be quasi-periodic spike trains produced by the nonlinear continuous dynamics of a neuron.
Bob, I love your posts and found the video very informative and well done. Not long enough as far as I was concerned. But I am still left some questions.
Most of them have to do with where the heat comes from that ENSO redistributes around the world. I gather that the source of it is tropical sunshine warming the equatorial pacific waters. So my question is, why has that been increasing over the last 30 years, raising ocean heat content, and not just evening out? Why the step up to new levels, rather than just back up to the same level?
I understand from the video how the La Nina events account for the ocean heat increase, and the subsequent spreading of that heat by El Ninos. But why have the La Nina’s put so much heat into the oceans during this time, for the El Ninos to spread it around and warm the whole atmosphere? I get the logic that this is hard to account for by purely GHG forcing, but I still don’t see where it is coming from. Is it a decrease in cloud cover over the tropics? Why so much decrease then? What is driving that?
It even makes me wonder how the oceans warm up to begin with. Is it only through direct sunshine? Does the GHG effect have any direct influence on ocean heat or surface temps? I understand how GHG effects can trap heat in the atmosphere, but can they have that effect on the oceans as well? What do the AGW people claim in that regards?
I know these are a lot of basic questions that may take too long for you to answer. Perhaps you could point me towards some links that do.
Thanks
On the predictability of ENSO, here’s pretty interesting read:
(start on PDF page 28, 2nd paragraph)
Also, what causes the increase in the strength of the trade winds, that creates La Nina conditions?
@ur momisugly Matthew R:
December 5, 2012 at 9:54 am
“to Mario Lento: The definition of oscillate:
“There are more kinds of oscillation than you itemize. There are quasi-periodic systems…”
I say, exactly… then say quasi-periodic. I was speaking of oscillate. The definition of oscillate is not the same as quasi oscillate.
Carrick says:
December 4, 2012 at 9:54 pm
“I’ve seen efforts to do both of these today at the AGU meeting…”
Glad to hear it.
Mario Lento says:
December 5, 2012 at 9:20 am
“The equation you provided as an analogy is predictable, while ENSO is not.”
That remains to be seen. These processes may not be deterministically predictable, but they can be statistically predictable, with an expectation and error bars.
phlogiston says:
December 5, 2012 at 11:53 am
“…if its a chaotic nonlinear one…”
A big IF. Some phenomena in nature are chaotic. Others are merely complex, and can often be decomposed into simpler, predictable parts. Sometimes, they are both. Even chaotic systems can be statistically predictable – I worked out a statistical characterization of the Baker Map for a class in chaos theory a couple of decades ago using the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation.
@Carrick says:
December 5, 2012 at 11:29 am
“Mario Lento:
ENSO does not swing back and forth between two points
ENSO does not vary above and below a mean value
Again “swing back and forth between two points” is a lay definition of oscillation.”
I understand, but oscillate is misunderstood to mean oscillate, when in fact the system does not oscillate… it kinda sorta oscillates and no one can predict or model it… Most people mis-believe El Nino and La Nino switch back and forth and have no net influence on heat balance. But they do not switch back and forth and do indirectly affect heat balance. That is the point being made, I believe.
If you are saying that it has some resemblance –then fine, I get it. But can’t you see past the simplicity of the argument here? Defining something by a very specific name, when that something is only “kinda-sorta” sometimes like that name, you lose my attention by not seeing the big picture.
I guess I could say that you and I are quasi correct… but that’s too fuzzy, weak and does not give credence to current understanding.